SmallBizResource Blog -- SmallBizResource

Harnessing the Power of the Bloggers

Posted by Naomi Grossman Wednesday, Aug 29, 2007, 08:44 AM ET

As a small business owner, it's not your idea, your product, or your service that separates you from the big guys.

It's the marketing.

Those big guys can afford to launch big campaigns, pay big bucks for ads, buy up keywords that will direct traffic to their sites.

What can you do?

You can pay a blogger to write about your product or service. The Wall Street Journal checks out a company that did it, and it seems to be working.

And why wouldn't it? The viral nature of the blogosphere is powerful (can you say Dan Rather?) and if harnessed in your favor, can give your company the exposure you need.

Apogee, the online marketing company profiled in the WSJ article, signed up with PayPerPost, last fall, right after the company began requiring its paid bloggers to disclose that they write paid posts. Simona Covel writes about the deal:

In January, it agreed to pay 20 bloggers a month around $10 each -- plus a fee to PayPerPost of around $2.50 per blogger -- to write a review about Apogee's blog, which the company uses to drive business to its services. After seeing its Web traffic grow, Apogee has ramped up the service. These days, it pays for about 100 postings a month, and the company says traffic is three times higher than it was a year ago.

There's more: "More than half of the traffic on Apogee's Web site now comes from blogs, compared with about 10% before the paid-posts campaign began. The number of site visitors who complete online-inquiry forms is now in the low hundreds each month, the company says, up four- to fivefold."

But be careful. As Dan Rather knows all too well, and as the guys from Apogee tell their clients who use paid bloggers, you have "limited control over what the bloggers say" about you.

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